


Part Tequila, Part Worm

by CiderApples



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-09
Packaged: 2019-03-15 17:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13618104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples
Summary: In which Betty follows in her mother's footsteps, and smell is the seed of memory.





	Part Tequila, Part Worm

  
He remembered the smell.

He must have been here as a kid. Maybe he'd been babysat here, while his mom took her doubles at the Pump & Go. Or maybe he'd done the babysitting: entertaining Jellybean with olive-stick swordfighting, or napkin paper planes. Had he played under the bar? In the closet under the stairs, spying on boots as they passed?

Everything pre-third-grade was a big dark blot, blacked out mostly on purpose: no reason to keep any of that around his neck.  
But somehow this smell had stayed with him, through his own historical revisions. Old wood. Alcohol. Boot polish. And…the last part. He still couldn’t pin the last part.

He looked up into the rafters where the lights hung: forty years old by now, like a high school theater, with their blue and red and green gels all burned through from the heat. The cables coiled and ran into the black ceiling like a viper pit — how _thematic_ — and his eyes chose this tangle to lose themselves in. It was all he could see with the angle of his head as it was, with the ruff of his hair filling Betty’s grip, strong enough to punch holes in her own skin and now focused on forcing his chin into the air, neck arched, eyebrows peaking up toward his hairline like that would reduce the pain.

In one deft tug, she forced his head to the side, his cheek hitting the cool floor of the Whyte Wyrm’s stage.

A blush of dust and ancient air plumed around his face, and suddenly, there it was: the last part of the smell.

It was on him. It _was_ him.

Sweat. His, hers, this particular kind: pheremonal, perfumed, part tequila, part worm.

He resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out and lick the boards, and then Betty pulled his head back to center.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he was grinning.

He looked up at her, straddling him, absolutely miraculous and fifty feet tall, stretching up toward the dark ceiling like an angel, blonde hair glowing amidst the electrical snakes, and took a deep breath.

“You,” he said. “Just you.”


End file.
